Monday, January 31, 2011

Egypt's Twitter is Cut Off-- Google to the Rescue!

Officially more badass than entire governments.

When the Internet went down in Egypt, a resource was lost for protest organizers. Twitter and Facebook, both key components to the civil disobedience (not to mention getting news OUT of Egypt), were fucked. Until Google decided to take a hand.

"We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet."

I find it kind of interesting that a corporate entity-- albeit, a giant like Google-- can completely defy a government's will by circumventing President Mubarak's Internet blackout. It's amazing.